The Richard Burton Diaries (94 page)

Wednesday 14th
We went to the church which is brighter and prettier than I remember but like all country R.C. churches is full of hideous but highly coloured plaster images. The boy's uncle Xavier something or other, a pretty Mexican girl, nicely pock-marked, Chas and Louise Collingwood both more plastered than any of the saints in the church, an elderly American who has, I'm told, had his face lifted three times, and Caroline, Jim and George, all left from the house in body, 15 minutes late because of guess who, and en-carred for the church. I carried a massive and quite beautiful candle which is a century or more old, I gather, and proved it by refusing to remain alight. E and I knelt at the altar while for a time a band played the processional march from Aida, which I swore and believed until shown otherwise by Jim and George, was Purcell's Trumpet Voluntory(?).
⁹⁸
My spelling is bloody awful. The Priest went on quite a bit, seven or eight minutes, but it was rapid Spanish and I only got the random word. I heard our names a couple of times and was told later that the chap had advised the little Sergio that if he brought as much honour and renown to his country as we had to ours, he would have accomplished a great deal in life. I've a feeling that the latter sentiment would meet with general approval only in our immediate families. However it was friendly enough.

I took an already stoned Chas Collingwood to the Oceano for a swift one before going up to the house and the champagne. He told me that Xavier was, is, Sergio's uncle and guardian and that he, Xavier, knowing himself to be a homo-sexual and fearing that the boy might become one too, arranged for him to be seduced, at the age of 12, mark you, by an accommodating Gringa. Not a whore, mind, but an obliging and easy lady. The deed was done and the boy went straight to the Priest and confessed. The same Priest who was trotting out homilies yesterday to the same boy. Charles added that the story goes on to say that this friendly lady left the boy of 12 to go on her weekly
assignation with Edgar Evans (founder of the famous London String Quartet) who is going on NINETY!
⁹⁹
For a small town there is a lot of action. [...]

Thursday 15th, Beverly Hills Hotel
[...] Having arrived at the bungalow of the B.H. hotel we had a great pleasure of meeting two friends of George Davis. They stayed for not more than two hours and were so fascinating that I fell asleep as they were being introduced. Somebody once said, probably me, that we remember too much. We shall not have our memories over-burdened by the above-mentioned.

Then Hugh French, to add to the general brilliance of the day, told me that the ‘sneak-previews’ of
Staircase
, except for one, were disastrous. Oddly enough I cared about this film but, what the hell, I'll just grow another callous. I'll end up with a mind like a miner's hands. [...]

Monday 19th, Paris, PA
[
Plaza Athenée
] Well, I'll tell you, as a result of people and places and Kate and fear and booze and jet-lag, particularly the penultimate, I don't know whether it's the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow.

Some observations from a scattered survey.

(A) Military heroes are inevitable bores. Yesterday I was stupefied by thousands of such people. They were gonged to the eyebrows but were incapable of syntactically putting a sentence together. I found myself helping them to express their adoration of Elizabeth in a language native to them but foreign to me. I thought about this phenomenon copiously and examined in absentia all the war-heroes I'd ever known and without question they are all bores. Sailor Malan, Douglas Bader, Group-Captain Cheshire, Audie Murphy and ‘Mad Jack’ Siegfried Sassoon, have, or had, the ability to stop a sentence dead in the middle of its predicate.
¹⁰⁰
Bader, said Sailor Malan, was not only fearless, but eliminated the idea of fear in others including myself. Now, any man who lacks fear is a bore. I am not a bore, he said fearlessly. I am not entirely sure that I know what I'm talking about.

(B) Jane Swanson is something that I have missed for a long time. I think that she has been so deeply enwrapped in the mutual envy of Dick and John that I never really had the chance to talk with and to her before.
¹⁰¹
She is very rewarding. She is also a very good listener, which is important in the case of a man who has firmly planned to go down into oblivion shouting new and
brilliant stories about R. Richardson, complete with new ones unknown hitherto even to Sir Ralph. She is attractive. She is strange. She is eminently sane. She has an exquisite daughter. She speaks as no other inhabitant of this vale of tears has ever done. But principally she is essentially, quintessentially, seimentally [
sic
] and un-ennuimentally [
sic
]
A LADY
! [...]

Tuesday 20th, Dorchester, London
Well we made it to London alright though all of us are suffering from monumental time-lags and today is going to be a relatively full one. I have costume fittings this morning, an aspect of the business which I detest, and a reading with the full cast at 2.30 this afternoon. I know practically everybody there and met the girl yesterday afternoon for the second time so it should be a reasonably affable affair though my old bête noire Tony Quayle will also be there.
¹⁰²
But I've no doubt that bygones will be bygones and those tiny button eyes in that great arse of a face will be twinkling with false bonhomie. It's toughest on the girl though, having to read cold with all those old pros watching and listening. She seems much more attractive since the first time I met her in Paris. Let's hope she turns out to be not only a good ‘un but a nice ‘un. Life is too short to work with ‘temperamental’ people throwing tantrums all the time. The only girl I've had trouble with for years was Mary Ure last year and before that it was Lana Turner about 1955.
¹⁰³
Otherwise I've been extremely lucky. And I've worked with a great top of ladies. My own E who apart from congenital tardiness is the favourite. Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Olivia de Havilland, Edith Evans, Claire Bloom, Fay Compton, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Roberts, Jean Simmons, Dorothy McGuire, Helen Hayes, Zena Walker and my old darling Pamela Brown et al et al.
¹⁰⁴
Perhaps it's something to do with ability because neither Lana can act at all, or Mary. They merely repeat lines by rote. But I think they both think very highly of themselves and are carrying on the mantle of Rachelle and Bernhardt and Duse.
¹⁰⁵
They couldn't carry their bloody bags.

Hugh French came over with us and went on about a TV show for E to do with Mancini, the musician, but I am still a snob about the medium.
¹⁰⁶
Thank
God I can afford to be but it still seems to me the cheapest and most vulgar of the performing arts media. I suppose I don't like the thought of any lazy Tom Dick or Harry switching over to Morecambe and Wise while I'm deep in the middle of ‘To be or not to be’.
¹⁰⁷
Or some ‘young man carbuncular’ masturbating in a dingy bed-sitter while goggling at E's breasts.
¹⁰⁸
Nevertheless we shall have to do something for Harlech one of these days. [...]

Wednesday 21st
I did my fittings in the morning and it was torture as usual. Though they have very kindly done their best to make the materials as light as possible, they are still very hot and there is going to be a great deal of sweating during the next three or four months. Maggie Furse was there, of course.
¹⁰⁹
Costume designers who are not out of the top-drawer are really not worth hiring. The costumes look magnificent but all the great work is done by the two boys who cut and sew. She simply looks up Holbein and illustrated books of costumes about the period in question.
¹¹⁰
I asked if they could change the shape of the shoes and make them come higher up the ankle as I have such idiotic calves. No, this was not possible as they were not the ‘period’. So you see she gets all her stuff from the books.

[...] I tried to read a detective story by Gore Vidal, writing under the name of Edgar Box but did not make more than two pages before Morpheus claimed me.
¹¹¹
[...]

Quayle was there and behaved exactly as I expected, eyes twinkling, much smiling, speaking his part with measured and unctuous precision. John Colicos too was there and runs Tony a pretty close second for close-set eyes. I doubt whether they could make one of Elizabeth's with both sets put together. His voice too was measured and sonorous. In fact they were both so ‘stagey’ that I found myself gruffing mine up and speaking at great pace rather than be like them. Still they are well cast – after all both Cromwell and Wolsey were sly and unctuous bastards. Not that Colicos in private life is a double-crossing promiser like Quayle. I'm told he is a very nice man. We had worked together many years ago in
Wuthering Heights
on TV in NY but I don't remember him at all.
¹¹²
Fortunately I had been warned by the director before hand so was able to make suitable cries of delighted remembrance.

The girl is very small in every way, in height, in weight and vocally. I could out-project her with a whisper. Her face too is tiny but the eyes and mouth are good. In size and pertness only, she reminds me of the late and lamented Vivien Leigh. It's difficult to tell at a reading but I think she might have difficulty with long sustained speeches, but doubtless we'll be able to fiddle around that with judicious cuts to listening faces etc. and a spot of dubbing. She said one sensible thing à la Elizabeth: when they brought those inevitable tedious cardboard models of the sets around she said ‘Those dolls houses mean absolutely nothing to me.’ Quite right too. [...]

Thursday 22nd
[...] Yesterday I rehearsed the song I have to sing in the film. It's very pretty but for an amateur, because of funny little stops in it, difficult to learn at such short notice. I record it this morning.

The doorbell rang yesterday morning about 11, and standing there was my niece Sian with an inevitable friend. Five minutes later another ring and it was Graham with an equally inevitable friend.
¹¹³
Why must they bring total strangers around with no advance notice? Showing off I suppose, but it shows a staggering amount of not understanding the kind of lives we are forced to live. E refused to come out to see them which is just as well because when she did come out later after the family had gone and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and the director of the Investiture were here her cold charmlessness was ice-bergian.
¹¹⁴
Ordinary social charm is not E's strong suit. She was lovely with the Loseys who came for lunch, but there was an oddly constricted atmosphere even with them and there were rather forced silences when nobody seemed to have anything to say.

Every encounter indeed that day was so dispiriting that it put me in a foul mood. I went into the spare room and played the song over and over to myself singing with it until I thought I'd got it. Despite all that concentration however I can't remember a phrase of it this morning. It will all come back of course as soon as I listen to it once more. Elizabeth was as bare-toothed as a tigress when I went into the other room and said ‘Surely you must know it by now!’ This was delivered with sullen venom and set my ill-temper even more firmly. Thereafter we played an absurd game of Musical Rooms. I refused to be in the same room as E and she with me, but we kept on running into each other. Finally she went to bed in the spare room while I read in the other bedroom until the doctor came. I then woke her up, told her I was going to take two sleeping pills, that I was going straight to bed and not to bother me! And with that he swep’ aht! What a fool I am.

How I could very well do without W. Vaughan Thomas. A pushy little man, though very bright. He means well but his ebullience makes me embarrassed. He's getting old of course. I remember how Dylan loathed him. [...]

Friday 23rd, London
I did the song at 11 o'clock with no difficulty. [...] I was thinking yesterday, not for the first time of the fuss everyone makes of E and I. There are other so-called superstars but nobody, as a couple, get paid so much attention. At Shepperton they have given us the boardroom in the ‘old house’ with a private kitchen across the corridor.
¹¹⁵
The boardroom has been changed into the most elegant nineteenth century dining room with French windows leading onto one of those incomparable stretches of English lawn dotted with magnificent old trees. There, on fine days – and who knows that we might not be due for a good summer – the experts say it's due – E can hold court in the afternoons and retain her suntan for the winter ahead. In addition, they have supplied E with a private dressing room one floor up from the dining room if she wants to sleep. And they have knocked down three walls in the main block to make a more than adequate ‘practical’ dressing room for me.
And we didn't ask
!!

Everybody assured me that the run from Shepperton to Aston Clinton to meet Gwen and so on to Ivor, was only
¹
/
₂
hour to 35 minutes.
¹¹⁶
After an hour's hard driving we were nowhere near the place. When I finally did arrive at 1.15 instead of 12.20 I was a charming chap. I scowled at Norma Heyman who had been one of the informants and then called R. McWhorter and told him that by the time I returned after spending an hour with Ivor the working day would practically be over. He agreed and said that they all (Wallis, Jarrott) agreed that it was more important that I see Ivor.
¹¹⁷
So they rehearsed without me. [...]

The improvement in Ivor is considerable. He can wheel himself about in a motorized chair and seemed in very good spirits. We told various and sundry stories some of which made him laugh so much that we had to wipe the tears away from his eyes. Gwen's selfless devotion to him verges on the saint-like. What a marvellous woman. Old-fashioned self discipline, old-fashioned virtue, old-fashioned devotion to a loved one is not often seen. There's none of that ‘fuck you Jack, I'm alright’ stuff about her.